Site Mobile Navigation

Ill Prepared for Snowfall, Britain Crawls to a Halt

Eurostar passengers, many out in the cold, lined up for seven hours in London on Monday in the hope of getting a train.Credit
Oli Scarff/Getty Images

LONDON — If there were a contest for the worst weather-related suffering in Britain in the last few days, who would win?

Would it be the drivers who abandoned their cars on the M5 highway and took their chances through driving sleet and unfamiliar snow banks? The Eurostar passengers lined up around the block for seven hours in freezing temperatures on Monday and again on Tuesday for the whisper of a possibility of a journey out? The people who have been sleeping on their suitcases at Heathrow Airport since Saturday?

Or maybe it would be someone like 70-year-old Frida Williams, who ventured out here on Monday after staying at home all weekend on account of her street’s having turned into a deadly ice rink that has not been sanded, salted, plowed or, apparently, addressed in any way.

“They’re never prepared for anything, are they?” said a cross Mrs. Williams, waiting for a bus in West London and contemplating the usual effect of snow and ice on her country: panic leading to chaos leading to recrimination.

Things are bad across Europe, which is in the midst of an icy cold snap that has disrupted transportation across much of the continent. Paris has been battered for days by alternating rain, sleet and snow, with temperatures hovering around freezing. On Monday, the French authorities asked airlines to cancel 30 percent of their flights from Orly and Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airports after a worse-than-forecast snowstorm. Eurostar urged travelers to postpone their journeys if possible.

In Germany and Amsterdam, the Frankfurt and Schiphol airports warned passengers to check with their airlines before leaving home.

In Britain, average temperatures have sagged to four or five degrees below normal, and the month is shaping up to be the coldest December in a century and the snowiest in 30 years. Except for a few days when the temperature lifted into the 40s, December has been relentlessly cold, windy, icy and unpleasant.

On Tuesday, British Airways forecast “significant disruption” in “the run up to Christmas,” usually one of its busiest periods.

There is something uniquely miserable about Britain in the grip of poor weather. Because its winters are usually mild, it is ill prepared for all but the slightest dusting of snow. (As a famous headline in London after a snowfall a few years ago put it: “Inch of Snow Causes Chaos.”) What the British consider a major storm is what, say, Norwegians might consider a gentle reminder to check the snow tires.

To put it all into perspective, during last weekend’s snowstorm, a quick but violent upheaval, just two to four inches fell in London. But it was enough to disrupt transportation for the rest of the weekend.

Meanwhile, only five inches of snow fell at Heathrow. But it set off a series of unfortunate events that somehow succeeded in virtually closing down the airport, stranding tens of thousands of gift-toting passengers during the busiest travel period of the year.

Many of them have been living in the airport, fighting over floor space and squabbling over dwindling supplies of food.

Photo

Luggage sits at Heathrow airport which has been experiencing flight delays due to the weather.Credit
Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An exasperated Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, told reporters on Monday: “It can’t be beyond the wit of man, surely, to find the shovels, the diggers, the snow ploughs or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes.”

The anger of the nation has focused on BAA, which owns and operates Heathrow.

After the first storm of the winter, several weeks ago, BAA promised that as the proud owner of some 69 snow-removal machines, it was well prepared for any weather-related eventuality. But its plan had a fatal flaw, BAA’s chief executive, Colin Matthews, told Channel 4 News on Monday.

BAA had not anticipated that the airplanes parked at 195 stands around the airport would be surrounded by so much snow, 30 tons from each stand, all of which needs to be cleared away, he said. He said that as soon as the airport could deal with the backlog of passengers — a distant prospect, considering that Heathrow’s second runway is to remain closed Tuesday — the company would “crawl all over this incident” to find out what had gone wrong.

Philip Hammond, the transportation secretary, told the House of Commons on Monday that “the forecast is for continued severe cold and further snowfall through the coming week and over Christmas and the New Year.”

Heathrow and British Airways have experienced a wearying number of shutdowns in recent years, due to strikes, fog and Icelandic volcano ash, as well as snow.

“This is now the third bad winter in a row,” Louise Ellman, the Labour chairwoman of the Commons transportation committee, said over the weekend. “We need to establish whether we think there may be a change of weather patterns and if so respond accordingly.”

John Hammond, a spokesman for the MetOffice, Britain’s national weather agency, said the cold winters were not a sign that Britain was cooling down because of climate change. All they mean, he said, is that the country is “at the mercy of air coming in from the continent and the Arctic Circle.”

Be that as it may, all Jane Wiest, a 45-year-old would-be airline passenger, wanted was to get to Miami. On Friday, she, her husband and their four children boarded a British Airways flight.

“It was a comedy of errors,” Ms. Wiest said on Monday in a telephone interview from Heathrow, where hope was triumphing over experience. “First they needed to de-ice the plane, but there was a queue for the machine, and then they ran out of de-icer.” Then the airline crew walked off the plane, having reached the end of its shift, and after six hours the passengers had to walk off, too.

The family rebooked for Monday and returned to Heathrow, only to discover the flight was canceled. They were hoping to catch a plane to New York.

“There are mattresses and blankets and pillows all over the place,” Ms. Wiest reported of the departure lounge. “There’s very little food left. There are huge queues to get a muffin, and then when you get to the front of the queue, there are no muffins left.”

On Monday night, the snow was starting up again in London. Luke Bosdet, a spokesman for the Automobile Association, said that if caught in a snowstorm, drivers should not abandon their vehicles.

“The general consensus is try to stay in the car if at all possible,” Mr. Bosdet said. “If you’re in an unfamiliar part of the road network and you go wandering off and don’t know where you are and you’re getting temperatures 15 and 20 degrees below zero...” he let the thought trail off. (That was in centigrade; the equivalent in Fahrenheit is four degrees to five below zero.)

“You might see a light in the distance, but you don’t know what’s between you and the light,” he said.

David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris, and Julia Werdigier from London.

A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2010, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Ill Prepared for Snowfall, Britain Crawls to a Halt. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe